Time at a hackathon runs much faster that you think, so you can use Heroku to kickstart your app and get database services up and running instantly. Heroku also provides an easy way for a team to collaborate and let the judges see there app in action.

Here are a few tips on how to get going with Heroku and you can also use this Heroku commands cheetsheet for as a quick reference.

Secure Shell (SSH) is an invaluable tool to help developers manage code and data over different computers and services, eg. Github, Heroku. By creating a public/private key it also means you dont have to enter a username & password each time you use the service. Ideally you should create a public/private key using a long passphrase, so that is what I will cover here.

Bringing developers with similar experiences and interests together is a great way to organise a Hackathon. At the latest Heroku hack, it brought together developers from media companies including the Financial Times, RBI, UBM, TicketMaster, Precursive and Tquila.

As this was the first event, I am very grateful to the 20 developers that braved the awful weather that day.

The evening started with a chance for developers to “talk tech” over free beer & pizza and discuss what challenges they wanted to work on that evening. In the end we split into teams based on the main language they wanted to work in and each team worked on a different application.

As most of the developers were new to Heroku, went over a check-list to get started. As its so easy to use Heroku then this only took a couple of minutes.

Thanks to the developers at Salesforce, we also had a “Heroku mentor” for each team to help them get going. Once everyone was over the initial steps with Heroku, the only challenging part was to work together to build their application in a short space of time.

Getting creative with Application Development

The different teams chose to develop applications with Java, Ruby and Node.js.

One team was quite ambitions in trying to build a location based app for seeing where the most popular tweets were coming from. Using Heroku Postgres they quickly extracted the data they needed. The location information would be shown using Google maps and unfortunately they introduced a bug they didn’t quite fix in in time that stopped those locations showing up as pins on the map.

One developer also succeeded in deploying something he had written previously, a graphical to-do list. Although it was a fairly static HTML & JavaScript site, by changing the index.html file to index.php then Heroku was happy to run it as an application.

The other teams created a voting application and an “all I want for christmas” wish list, similar to Amazon.

So every team got something deployed live to the Internet, some teams even got more than one app live!

The hackathons go on and the next one will be an all day Hack the Tower at one of the tallest buildings in London, Tower 42. Salesforce has an office with amazing views and we 50 developers signed up across different technical communities.

Update: December 2013 - HackTheTower has now moved to the Salesforce Tower in London, previously known as the Heron tower.

Back to basics

By popular demand, I’m also planning some Heroku workshops at Tower42 (where I am also running “Hack the Tower”). These workshops will give developers the experience needed to help them deploying their apps naturally and give them an effective deployment workflow with other common tools such as Github.

The workshops will also give developers insight into how they can learn other cool technology such as MongoDB & Redis without the hassle of installation and configuration.

Sign up for free to the London Salesforce Developer community to keep up with these events.I am also planning a talk for the London Java Community (3,000 members) on “Heroku for Java Developers”. This will help give developers a good overview of the platform capabilities, the developer workflow & tools as well as add-ons and cool technology they can easily try out.

I was a little surprised to have an access issue with Heroku when using my new Mac Book Pro, as its always been really easy to deploy my applications to Heroku in the past. I kicked myself when I realised I’d only set up a public key specifically for my Github account.

This got me to wondering the best way to set up keys given I am using different services for both personal project and work.

Saturday 27th saw a great hackday thanks to Robert Rees, The Guardian and members of the London Scala user group. The ambitious challenge was to build an community website where events, conferences, blogs, code repos and community discussions were all available from one place.

There are several websites out there that do a part of what a community needs, to this project is trying to help bring all that together in one place. So the grand plans include, pulling in content from event sites, publishing events to sites, register at events with a single touch and widely distribute your interest and attendance automatically.

Or just have fun hacking on some cool technology and learning something new.

Over 7,000 developers flocked to the DevZone at this years Dreamforce conference. I was one of them and along with Adam Seligman, Keir Bowden and Andy Mahood we told tales of our experiences to the London Salesforce Developer community.

Wes Nolte took charge of the mike and quizzed the panel on their experiences of the event. Here are the questions that stuck in my memory from the evening

What was the thing that got you most excited about Dreamforce ?

The thing that got to me was the sheer size of it all. With so many developers around it was great that we had a whole of Moscone West to spread it all out. There were banks of laptops provided for anyone to get involved in coding workshops and all through the day they were all filled up.

There were so many different things to do, from playing donkey kong to coding, listening to great talks, guided tutorials, code consultations and quizing lots of people from Salesforce and Heroku about their platforms.

The biggest problem was what to actually do from so much choice. Of course there was an app for that too and a chatter stream so you could discuss sessions as well.

If you couldn’t make up your mind you could also queue up and print your own t-shirt!

It was a sign of how open the conference was to have an un-conference section, where anyone could propose a talk. There was even a theatre dedicated to community related talks. I met some great guys from Bristol who are starting up their own Salesforce community events.

What was your favourite session ?

The most entertaining session was by James Governor from RedMonk, comparing the rise of craft brewing with the rise of developers. Craft brewing is bringing back the entrepreneurial flavour into beer making and bringing quality product to the market. Developers are doing the same for startups and enterprises around the world. Calling developers the new kingmakers, James highlights how important developers are and the responsibility we have on our shoulders to support the businesses and projects we are involved in. See article….

I also really enjoyed the live coding challenges from MVP developers and developer evangelists. There was a great banter as well as great code being bashed out.

My favourite moment was when one of my colleagues was presenting. They had a great presentation line up, all using on-line resources and then the wireless failed. Before the venue tech guys had chance to fix it, someone from the audience donated their phone and the presentation was on again. I had a warm fuzzy feeling about that!

All through the conference there was a feeling of collaboration and community. Whether that be debugging each others code through the workshops or collaborating on the mini-hacks. There was a constant stream of activity every day.

What new stuff are you already using or want to try straight away ?

In a nutshell, it has to mobile development. I remember spending a day in a workshop getting up to speed with development on Android devices and there was still lots to learn by the time I had finished. That seems like a lifetime compared what I saw at Dreamforce. Using the Salesforce Touch platform you can easily and quickly build HTML5 and hybrid applications in be finished in hours, not days.

It seemed the hardest thing for mobile development using the Touch platform was registering for your Apple ID.

Turing the tables on the audience

At the end we turned the tables and each panellist got to ask a question of the audience.

I wanted to shorten our name from “Salesforce platform developers user group London”, not the easiest thing to tell your friends about. From the feedback we got we have changed it to the punchier London Salesforce Developers, which encompasses the different platforms (heroku, force.com, data,com, etc) under one name.

Summary

Over 80 developers braved the cold October night to hear about out experiences and it was a great social event, made even better by the beer and pizza provided by Tquila.

Thanks also to our gratious hosts, 10Gen, for providing the venue. 10Gen are the company behind the popular MongoDB.